Trading Power Consumption Against Performance by Reserving Blocks of Servers (2012)

Author(s): Mitrani I

Abstract: We consider the problem of managing a service center where it isdesirable to keep power consumption low. Customers may be patientor they may defect (i.e. leave the system) if waiting times aretoo long. Several blocks of servers are designated as `reserves'.They are powered up and down when the queue size increases above orfalls below certain thresholds. Objective functions to beminimized take into account the number of servers that arepowered up, the number of occasions when blocks are powered upand a performance measure involving either waiting timeor number of jobs lost through defections. The question of how tochoose the blocks of reserves is answered by analyzing a suitablequeueing model. Heuristic policies are proposed and numericalresults are presented.

Pages: 8

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne